1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an automatic card dispenser for dispensing various kinds of cards, tickets and the like, such as lunch tickets, toll road tickets, ID-cards, etc. This invention is applicable to a card dispenser which dispenses cards containing different entries depending on the input signal, and particularly suitable for automatic dispensing of monthly, quarterly, etc. railway and subway passes, tickets or commutation cards.
The description appearing herein after is with reference to a particular embodiment of a monthly pass dispenser.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In general, in issuing monthly railway passes, the name of the starting station and the terminal station, the period of validity, and the issue date are stamped on a card. This work takes a long time and considerable labor is required to check the work to prevent mistakes. It is, therefore, strongly desired to do this work automatically to reduce the work required in issuing such cards.
As a conventional ticket dispenser, an automatic ticket dispenser is known in the art in which a disc bearing a number of indicia of the names of stations, periods of validity and other letters and numerals is rotated to select indicia according to the input information and indicia is recorded on an electrostatic recording paper using light and an electrostatic recording means. Such a device has a defect that the indicia 104 must be recorded only in the annular part 102 of the disc 101 as shown in FIG. 1. This is because the radial length of the part where the indicia are recorded is determined by the size 103 corresponding to the actual size of the ticket. In tickets such as railroad tickets, it is only required to indicate the start station and the price, and accordingly, the number of indicia to be recorded is not so large. In case of a monthly pass, however, the items to be recorded are quite large in number, e.g. 1,000. If the disc is used for retaining the great number of indicia, the diameter of the disc inevitably is large and accordingly the size of the dispenser becomes too large. It is also proposed to use a rolled microfilm to increase the number of the indicia recorded. In addition, to reduce the work load and labor involved in issuing a large number of kinds of tickets with indicia storage means of a small size, one additional problem to be solved other than space is how to dispense the tickets and a further important problem is how to shorten the time for dispensing each ticket.
A reduction in the number of indicia is one approach and the shortening of the dispensing time is another. For instance, in case of dispensing monthly tickets, the number of numerals to be entered into the form of the ticket is 20 to 30. If these numerals are recorded in advance as different indicia on a recording member, the selection and exposure of the indicia can be made at once but the number of indicia recorded in advance is quite large. If the number of numerals is 20, the theoretically possible combinations of the numerals is as large as 10.sup.20.
If the numeral indicia are recorded in a divided form so as to be composed at the time of exposure, for instance, to be composed using twenty exposures, the number of numeral indicia can be reduced to 10 .times. 20 = 200, but the time for selection and exposure is increased by a factor of 20 times the time for exposure where all the numerals are recorded for the different indicia in advance.